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Beyond Screen vs. Print

A mystery that I find interesting is why the screen readers and networked communications don't assimilate prospects for physical book as well. It appears that the networked book advocates wish to disown the print book just as the digitally produced, network supported print book shows every sign of ascendance with authors. Think of the attributes that the print book would bring to the augmentation of the screen book!

"There is at present no possibility whatever of rapidly browsing a physical book on-line. In about two minutes with a physical book, a skilled library researcher can tell you a great deal about it. Concordance indexing (indexing by actual words in the text) retrieves so much useless material that true browsing is almost impossible with it, even for skilled users." Andrew Abbott

Of course browsing has also been dismissed by the screen book advocates as is apparent in the new wave of print re-shelving by size. Here again in his report on the University of Chicago Library expansion, Andrew Abbott points out the print associated attribute of browsing.

"It is crucial to recognize that (browsing) happens at many different levels in library research, not just as one: within books as one turns the pages, on shelves as one searches for a book, in the stacks as one walks by unknown call numbers, in bibliographic indexes and other research tools as one glances through topics, and so on. In all these cases, the power of browsing is great. Note that this means that browsing is a constant concomitant of library research, not an occasional activity within it. Browsing is always going on and gaining knowledge from browsing is not a rare, serendipitous event but rather a constant, routine one."

But, if physical book use is the only book reading experience that cannot be simulated on the screen, why not subsume the physical book into prospects for the networked book? As a start, why not confirm print as a product of digital technologies? Why not take credit for the digital technologies that now enable the paper book? Why not also assume that the book is not captive of any given format?

Now it is apparent that admission, rather than denial, of print attributes will only enhance prospects for the screen book. Especially in the regions of classical print attributes, the screen book should just adopt the print book as an add-on feature. The print attributes of legibility and immediacy of meaning without need for de-selection of irrelevant content, of haptic efficiencies such as fan scanning a paper book, and of persistence or default preservation demonstrated by the paper book will only complement the screen book.

In the end it is not important which format is senior and which is junior, which is the manuscript and which is the published presentation or which format is forward looking. What is useful is that the future of the book may depend on the integration of attributes of networked and physical book.